MIAMI (AP) — A voting technology company is suing Fox News, three of
its hosts and two former lawyers for former President Donald Trump —
Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell — for $2.7 billion, charging that the
defendants conspired to spread false claims that the company helped
“steal” the U.S. presidential election.
The 285-page complaint
filed Thursday in New York state court by Florida-based Smartmatic USA
is one of the largest libel suits ever undertaken. On Jan. 25, a rival
election-technology company — Dominion Voting Systems, which was also
ensnared in Trump's baseless effort to overturn the election — sued Guiliani and Powell for $1.3 billion.
Unlike
Dominion, whose technology was used in 24 states, Smartmatic's
participation in the 2020 election was restricted to Los Angeles County,
which votes heavily Democratic.
Smartmatic's limited role
notwithstanding, Fox aired at least 13 reports falsely stating or
implying the company had stolen the 2020 vote in cahoots with
Venezuela's socialist government, according to the complaint. This
alleged “disinformation campaign” continued even after then-Attorney
General William Barr said the Department of Justice could find no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
For
instance, a Dec. 10 segment by Lou Dobbs accused Smartmatic and its
CEO, Antonio Mugica, of working to flip votes through a non-existent
backdoor in its voting software to carry out a “massive cyber Pearl
Harbor," the complaint alleged.
“Defendants’ story was a lie," the complaint stated. "But, it was a story that sold.”
The
complaint also alleges that Fox hosts Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and
Jeanine Pirro also directly benefitted from their involvement in the
conspiracy. The lawsuit alleges that Fox went along with the
“well-orchestrated dance” due to pressure from newcomer outlets such as
Newsmax and One America News, which were stealing away conservative,
pro-Trump viewers.
Roy Gutterman, a media law professor at
Syracuse University, said the lawsuit is compelling and based on
specific examples and facts, not frivolous claims.
“This is a perfect example of why we have the law of defamation in first place,” said Gutterman, a former reporter.
Fox
News Media, in a statement on behalf of the network and its hosts,
rejected the accusations. It said it is proud of its election coverage
and would defend itself against the “meritless” lawsuit in court.
Fox
"is committed to providing the full context of every story with
in-depth reporting and clear opinion,” the company said in a written
statement.
Giuliani and Powell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
For
Smartmatic, the effects of the negative publicity were swift and
devastating, the complaint alleges. Death threats, including against an
executive’s 14-year-old son, poured in as Internet searches for the
company surged, Smartmatic claims.
With several client contracts
in jeopardy, the company estimates that it will lose as much as $690
million in profits over the next five years. It also expects it will
have to boost spending by $4.7 million to fend off what it called a
“meteoric rise” in cyberattacks.
“For us, this is an existential
crisis,” Mugica said in an interview. He said the false statements
against Smartmatic have already led one foreign bank to close its
accounts and deterred Taiwan, a prospective client, from adopting
e-voting technology.
Like many conspiracy theories, the alleged
campaign against Smartmatic was built on a grain of truth. Mugica is
Venezuelan and Smartmatic’s initial success is partly attributable to
major contracts from Hugo Chávez's government, an early devotee of
electronic voting.
No evidence has emerged that the company rigged
votes in favor of the anti-American firebrand, and for a while the
Carter Center and other observers held out Venezuela as a model of
electronic voting. Meanwhile, the company has expanded globally.
Smartmatic
is represented by J. Erik Connolly, who previously won what's believed
to be the largest settlement in American media defamation, at least $177
million, for a report on ABC News describing a company's beef product
as “pink slime.”
“Very rarely do you see a news organization go
day after day after day against the same targets," Connolly said in an
interview. “We couldn't possibly have rigged this election because we
just weren't even in the contested states to do the rigging.”
Fox,
after receiving a demand for retraction from Smartmatic’s lawyers in
December, aired what it called a “fact-checking segment” with an
election technology expert. In the segment, the expert said there was no
evidence of tampering — something the defendants knew from the start
and reported elsewhere on the network, the complaint alleges.
Far
from making the company whole, Mugica said he saw the segment — in which
an unidentified voice asks questions referenced in the retraction
letter — as an admission of guilt.
Gutterman said that any
after-the-fact correction can be a mitigating factor but doesn't get of
the defendants entirely off the hook if they are found to have
previously been propagating false claims. With the line between fact and
opinion increasingly blurred in the current media landscape, he said he
expects the lawsuit to force news outlets trying to capitalize on
support for Trump to reconsider how far to stretch the limits.
“This
is certainly a wake-up call that, just because you’re dealing in
opinion and not straight news, you can’t openly put anything on the
air,” he said. “Facts are still facts.”
